The preparation of beans for harvesting usually involves cutting the mature plants, and raking them into windrows forming a resilient mass of entangled plants a foot or two in depth, and on the order of six feet wide. The plants must be left to dry under the action of the sun and wind long enough for the pods to become sufficiently brittle to permit a threshing operation proceed. These windrows will obviously be spaced by areas of open ground, on which nothing but the plant stubble remains. Most of this type of farming is done in the western plains area, in which the land is flat and subject to extended periods of high wind. While moving air is necessary to the proper drying of the plants, too much of it produces a very serious problem. A high wind occurring near the end of the drying period can easily jostle the plants sufficiently to break open the pods, and induce a partial threshing action dumping the beans on the ground. A more common catastrophe is the bodily transportation of the plants from the windrows to the extent of distributing them generally around the countryside. The loss of crop value in one day or night of such wind has frequently been known to amount to one hundred percent. It is usual to expect at least a twenty percent crop loss to this action every season. Crop losses in one day on one farm from such wind action alone have frequently amounted to between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars.
Attempts have been made to control these wind losses in various ways. One of these has been through the application of sprayed chemicals having a tendency to bind the mat of cut plants together. It is obviously difficult to find spray materials which will be completely non-toxic, as these beans are for human consumption. Any system for confining these windrows must also take into consideration the simple questions of economics. Any system utilizing expensive equipment or large amounts of manual labor are obviously limited in their value. The present invention has been devised as a practical and inexpensive complete solution to this problem.